Part Two: Rivière-du-Loup in the Dust of Kandahar
some years later
I still haven’t forgotten the smell
of the cafeteria
in the high school hall
the recruiters had placed
brochures on a table
once night had fallen
the names of the dead soldiers
were recited
at Hockey Night in Canada
I remember having seen the recruiters again
in the parking lot of the shopping mall
and having considered throwing
a snowball at them
I didn’t end up doing it
*
*
the corporal Martin Dubé
came from Fossambault
like the poet
who died going up river
there is no point
in waking the dead
whether they were famous
or they were blown up
not far from Kandahar
yet I have the memory of happy wars
and of their statues in parks
as proud
as Saint-Denys Garneau
laid down in the middle of his field
I would like it to have been
in the middle of a field
his gaze turned up to the sky
like the national poets
know how to do
when their bodies marry
the native land
of which we are gently aware
like the brightness of telefilms
*
*
A city, a city like any other
with its shopping mall, its Tim Hortons,
its McDonald’s, its Dixie Lee, its Walmart,
its pots of begonias in the center of boulevards
a few schools, some green spaces, an empty skating rink,
policemen, firemen, postmen,
a hospital, a town hall, a town like any other
with a main street
its regulars at the bar
some sidewalks, a few old garages
and a bridge to jump off
*
*
they had built a city on a swamp
knowing that one day it would end by sinking
Pompei of sheds and above-ground pools
along the railway there is a place
where children lie down on the rails
to feel the shuddering of the train
the neighbor drank all the nail polish remover
and wrote her last letter
in a courtyard, a bastard dog
gnaws at the rings of his chain
an owl screeches
the neighbor wakes up in a frenzy
of veins and arteries
creased paper and creaking blinds
the shadow is there at the top of the larch
the cat should not have been let outside
*
*
in the motor
of the mowers
memories melt away
like urinal cakes
they built a mini putt
on the Indian cemetery
before the lawns
there were beaten paths
from many footsteps
your eyes had the color
of all the railroads
your fingers sank in
like barbed wire
on the prairie
but our ability to forget buries everything
even death
thus what remains
is only the vague anguish of a golfer
before the totems
*
*
even if they were let loose on us,
the dogs of torment
we would have to go to
the far corners
of savagery
through order we have found
the millennial shoreline in order to see
what others had seen
and sea spray that sticks to clothing
like a second skin
on the cliff they had painted
the face of an Indian chief
and lying next to trailers
a giant resin bear statue
he watched over the campers
so that they keep memories
beautiful as the twilight
of leaflets
*
*
they lived sheltered from bombs
in the basements
without thinking of rationing
nor of the lineups growing
in front of the new hardware store
the darkness of curfew
was cradled by the glow of cable channels
before which they made dreams
of pieces of flesh
glimpsed through
scrambled porn
*
*
in the foreground of fallen geese hunters pose
with their eyes scintillating like the dress of a graduate
the fanfare still echoes
but we have forgotten where the border is
Hadrien builds his wall in front of the shopping mall fountain
that smells of chlorine and rusted pennies
in the dead gazes we read only what we can invent
large sail boats and endless tundra
or the steps of legions at the limits of the empire
crisscrossing the beauty extended
on the yellowed October lawn
although Rome burned for millennia
its ashes are the still-warm color of blood
that flows between the eyelid and the bench of white feathers
*
*
they almost escaped
there, where the river and the wind break the ice floor
to make them look like the very hands of winter
that will snap in the troughs of the waves
in the distance the smoke of the paper mill
rises toward the plane-streaked sky
in which the stewardesses
gesture toward emergency exits
as if praying
while the air of the shoal
stiffens with flocks of snow buntings
they could believe
just by raising their eyes
they could believe
in spells cast
by the traced-out formula
of intercontinental flights
*
*
they will grow older, leaving behind them
that which had basically never been
here the past only exists to be covered
yet her skin had the pallor of ruins
and her nails scratched at the salt
to dig out Carthage
they will grow old
under the benevolent gaze of drones
already far from those days, buried away
without even taking the time
to mourn their dead
*
*
the whitish houses on the edges of highways
all have a car that rots
at the back of their badly mowed lawns
an old yellow dog at the end of its chain
and the sound of tires on asphalt
to break their solitude
we finish, perhaps, by getting used to
the weather over time
by convincing ourselves we are seaside
with waves like cars
and sprays of diesel
perhaps also the children
end up making dreams
of cruise ships
of sail boats
dreams of being swept far far away
in the hold
of a freightliner
*
*
she had long dreamed of setting fire
to the peatlands surrounding the city
to finally eradicate the light
she was night itself
forgotten by the Lifestyle section of the paper
and the evenings before the flat screen
lost in the idea of cliffs
of which she knew, beautiful like
the explosion of a pressure-cooker
in the middle of a crowd
there is no time to die
when the blood fades
in all the shades of forgetting
the nights pass, the centuries,
but the peat
once set aflame
never goes out
*
*
she enclosed herself
in the bathroom
and said I am going to slit my wrists
she did not do it that day
there are still all those stories to tell
from the smell of new books
to the soap powder on the floor
when a student vomited
she had arrived at school
with a flute and an island accent
but that means nothing
to those who haven’t been there
you would have to have seen her
with the color inherent to memories